The artwork accompanying a recent essay makes them look positively human. Just where Ooga! Ooga! has got himself to now, we are not sure.
Tag: Neanderthals
Latest from Daytime Soaps 120,000 BC season: Inbreeding may have caused Neanderthal extinction
Well, now that our writer mentions it, we don’t really have thousands of Neanderthals for a big sociological study. It’s interesting, of course, and the main thing is, we can probably get more information as we continue to dig.
“Humans still marry Neanderthals?” This is what some people call science
So may we now blame Neanderthals for our own bad choices? Wow.
How Neanderthals got the role of The Subhumans
The “shock value” of officially scientific concepts of the subhuman was a harbinger of things to come.
The “dumb Neanderthal” myth dies hard
Prediction: Neanderthals will suddenly become just like us if a different set of putative “less than human” bones turns up. So long as there is no other “not quite human” in easy view, it really doesn’t matter what Neanderthals actually did. They’ll still have to be cast that way to appear in the approved drama of human evolution.
Cultural evolution theories “challenged” by multiple dwelling cave
This kind of find is treated as problematic because it means that the missing link is still missing. Nobody is the subhuman. That’s not good news for a Darwinian approach to human evolution, in which someone must be the subhuman.
Darwinian evolution and underestimating the Neanderthals
A zoologist asks why we need to see Neanderthal man as dumb: Talking about a recent paper discussing differences in skull shape, he notes, In the Pleistocene world of rapidly changing ecological scenarios luck had everything to do with success or failure. It was all about being in the right place at the right time, […]
Did Neanderthals create the first Spanish cave paintings?
If they did, that’ll be even less reason to think of them as some kind of “missing link”: What if, long before Leonardo da Vinci or Michelangelo, the Neanderthals were humanity’s first artists? At any rate, this is the hypothesis raised by new dating of Spanish rock paintings published in February 2018 in the journal […]
Rob Sheldon: Did humans see the color blue before modern times?
Perhaps we should say, we cannot discriminate “blue” without a word for it? For sure. This is the property of language. As linguists will say, a word excludes more than it includes. And if we don’t have a word, we lack the ability to discriminate (or, as Aristotle shows us, we make up a word on the spot, we “categorize”.)
Researcher: Teeth are an “astonishing” source of information
Reflections on a recent study of Neanderthal children’s teeth and one other (5000 ya): Teeth are a really useful indicator of past environments. This is possible because teeth have biological rhythms, and key events get locked inside them. These faithful internal clocks run night and day, year after year, and include daily growth lines and […]
Lots of Neanderthals in our family tree, says new report
Something you probably already suspect: It happened many times: The presence of these chunks, making up 2%, on average, of the genome of anyone with roots in Europe, Asia, Australia or the Americas, pointed to a single period of intermingling – probably 50,000 to 60,000 years ago – not long after Homo sapiens emerged from […]
Study: Neanderthals did not live more violently than other ancient peoples
From a study of over 200 skulls: Males suffered the bulk of harmful head knocks, whether they were Neandertals or ancient humans, the scientists report online November 14 in Nature. “Our results suggest that Neandertal lifestyles were not more dangerous than those of early modern Europeans,” Harvati says. Bruce Bower, “Skull damage suggests Neandertals led no […]
Neanderthals walked normally, upright, say researchers
The skeleton was of a 32-year-old man: Neanderthals walked upright, had spines straighter than those of modern man, would have been strong and sturdy, and breathed deeply from their bell-, not barrel-shaped ribcages, according to a recently published article written by an international team of scientists. Busting open the myth of the arm-dragging, hunched-over caveman, […]
No one evolved faster than the Neanderthal
Look how smart he got in the last few decades: This from a discussion of whether Neanderthals had language: Based on these results, most researchers agree Neanderthals were capable of emitting and hearing complex vocalizations. However, they disagree over the implications. While some consider the findings indicative of speech-based language in Neanderthals, others propose these […]
Two Neanderthal children from 250 kya showed lead exposure, and much else
Based on an analysis of their teeth: Two 250,000-year-old teeth from two Neanderthal children revealed that both of them were exposed to lead twice during their short lifetimes, the first known case of lead exposure in Neanderthals… “Teeth record environmental variation based on the climate, even where you’re growing up,” said Tanya Smith, lead author […]